Square Online: Turn on Curbside Pickup

[Tom]

This post was updated by a community moderator on April 20, 2020 to reflect app improvements and feature enhancements.

We know that foot traffic is a challenge for restaurants during this time of social distancing and even more of a predicament in areas with shelter in place. You can still reach your customers online with Square Online. Our new Curbside Pickup option allows your customers to request pickup and text message notifications—making for a seamless customer experience.

To turn on Curbside Pickup:

• Sign into the online Square Dashboard, follow the onboarding steps, and turn on in-store pickup.
• Next, click the checkbox to turn on curbside pickup for the appropriate location. Note that you must have a phone number set for your location in order to use curbside pickup. The phone number is given to customers who request curbside pickup during checkout.
• Finally, you can use the Edit location details link to add or edit your phone number.

To see what it looks like, check out the video below. If you're in the retail business, check out our tutorial for shop owners instead.

For complete details, head on over to this article: The Checkout Experience. If this is your first time viewing this article, you may receive a prompt to log in — to proceed with viewing, simply click Maybe later.

Interested in delivering locally? Consider this solution: Turn on Local Delivery.

If any questions or concerns come up, please let us know!

[funkfactory]

Is there a way to only allow X number of pick ups per time slot?  That would be VERY helpful in ensuring social distancing during pick up windows (ie. not everyone showing up right at the opening of the day's window).

[sunbird]

This is a big concern of ours as well. We are planning to set this service up shortly. When we do, we need a way to “throttle” customer orders. People should not be clustering at busy times. There should be an order cap on each hour, set by the business, in addition to general open hours. Otherwise things can get out of hand in a hurry and worse, unnecessarily put people at risk. 

[rmariotti]

Agreed. This would help us out tremendously as well. We were crushed with pickups yesterday between 11-1, but dead from 1-3. Capping orders per window would be great.

[AoGH]

Same for us as well!

[TMD]

As to whether it’s possible to limit orders in time slots... no, no & no. We’re finding this to be nightmarish for our customer & is.

[holisticdesign]

There isn't a way to do this yet for Square, but I did develop this for one of my clients as a Shopify store (https://johnnyandmaes.com). My client is able to choose the days and times they are open for pickup as well as limit how many orders can be placed per time slot; each time slot was 15 minutes in their case. If you are interested in having a Shopify store made instead with this functionality, let me know! My email is [Personal Information Redacted]

[rmariotti]

We really, REALLY need to display the Pickup Date in the Orders tab. We have everything setup as "2 Business Days" on prep time, but the Orders screen has no way to see the pickup date. The Orders screen is just a laundry list of Active Orders sorted descending by order date. It's nearly unusable. It needs to be enhanced with the following:

• Display Pickup Date
• Allow Filtering by Pickup Date
• Allow Filtering by In Progress and Ready for Pickup status
• Allow column sorting

For high-volume businesses that operate with lead times longer than "available same day", the Orders page is brutal to use without the above.

[columbiafarmers]

Is there a way to request vehicle type and specify pickup times?

[dp1]

The ability to limit the number of pickups per day would be a huge help to us.  I can also see how limiting the number of pickups per time slot would be a huge help to a lot of other users.

[horseradish]

Seriously!  It seems Square updated the checkout screen this week so that it defaults to the earliest pick up time.  You have to click "edit" to schedule a pick up.  So today we're flooded with orders all for the first pick-up time.  This needs to be addressed!

[Gonzospollo]

How can my customers let me know when they will be coming (what time) to pick up at my curbside.  It is important that I don't let their orders sit for hours.

I am using a terminal as POS

[JustinC]

@Gonzospollo

Customers won't be be able to schedule a time to pick up their order if they select curbside. However, they receive a notification email after they place their order instructing them to call-in when their outside your establishment.

Check to see if you contact number is up to date under Settings > Pickup & Delivery > Edit location > Allow Curbside. 

[Mommashayskitc]

I've have several chargebacks since covid and its frustrating. We have started taking payments by phone and we have customers bring card used to show us. Yet the information square collects can't fight the chargebacks. 

As a restaurant offering seafood this is costing me too much money. If all a customer has to say is they have no knowledge of charge.  

Is there a way to capture name on the card,Phone numbers? If they call from a work phone or friend's phone it can't be used to help dispute.  

[justaquestion]

I'm trying to turn on curbside pickup so that I can (hopefully!) use the feature that allows customers to reply HERE via text to trigger an On-POS arrival alert. 

The simplest path, looking under "Edit pickup settings" shows me a greyed-out checkbox for Curbside pickup....it won't allow me to click it, and of course provides no explanation for why. 

I do have On-POS arrival alerts enabled (from the pickup and delivery/advanced settings page) but it doesn't work. When I test it myself, I get a text back that says "We're sorry, but we're having some technical difficulties. Please call us and we'll bring your order to you." I don't want people to have to call! I want them to be able to reply HERE to let us know. I'm confident this is a need for many many restaurants and cafes!

[ashc]

Hey @justaquestion,

I moved your post to an existing thread that goes over how to set up curbside.

Check out the post above for details and options you have with it.

Anything outside of what's listed would be considered a feature request including the text to say "HERE" as you mentioned.

If you follow these steps and still can't get it enabled, you'd want to reach out to our direct CS E-Comm team who can take a closer look with you to troubleshoot if it's buggy.

In the future, don't hesitate to search your question first here or on the Support Center for your quickest answer too!